I am a MA/MBA candidate at the Lauder Institute and the Wharton School of Business. I focus on Russian politics, economics, and demography but also write more generally about Eastern Europe. Please note that all opinions expressed here are mine and mine alone and that I do not speak in an official capacity for Lauder, Wharton, Forbes or any other organization.
I do my best to inject hard numbers (and flashy Excel charts) into conversations and debates that are too frequently driven by anecdotes. In addition to Forbes I've written for True/Slant, INOSMI, Salon, the National Interest, The Moscow Times, Russia Magazine, the Washington Post, and Quartz.
I frequently make pronouncements of great importance on Twitter @MarkAdomanis. Compliments? Complaints? Job offers? Please feel free to e-mail me at RussiaHand@gmail.com

How Russia And The United States Have Fared Since The Great Recession

Spurred in part by a solid February jobs number, there has been a lot of talk recently about how the United States has finally recovered from the Great Recession. While no one has gotten overly triumphalist, it took the United States quite awhile to recover its pre-crisis peak and unemployment remains persistently elevated, I think it’s safe to say that mainstream commentators, people like Matt Yglesias and Derek Thompson, are the most optimistic that they’ve been in the past several years. And this seems justified: there’s been a long stretch of private sector job growth and the economy has been posting steady, if unremarkable, growth rates for the past several years. There is, of course, wariness over the impact of sequestration and substantial disagreement over the future course of the US economy, but I read an awful lot of economic commentary and the general discourse has shifted out of crisis-mode to business as usual.

So I had a truly radical thought: I would together a few charts showing how the United States and Russia have rebounded since the onset of the great recession. I obviously have my own interpretation of the information contained in these graphs (to make a long story short I think that Russia has actually handled the crisis pretty decently) but in this case I want to keep my own opinions on the short side and allow people to draw their own conclusions. So, without further delay, let’s get to the graphs!

Does any of the above paint Russia as some sort of dramatic success story that should be emulated by other countries? Not really. But I always find it interesting to compare Russia’s actual economic performance (pretty decent) with how it is most commonly described (awful, worsening, incompetent, or catostrophic). I also find it funny to think how people would describe Russia if, like the United States, it had doubled its government debt, never reduced unemployment to its pre-crisis level, or had gone through almost seven full years without any real increase in per capita output.

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Why is america so good right now?? because they print money like crazy, have a shale oil technology and make debt like crazy. It has nothing to do with having a better government or being the better society.

Not a particularly good way to make a comparison, because the Russian and US economies are incomparable (one is converging, the other is a leader). It would be more instructive to make the comparison with similar-level CEE/EE economies like Poland, Croatia, the Baltics, the Ukraine, Belarus, etc (which of course you’ve already done… but nothing wrong with a next-year update).

Bearing in mind the differences in kind between the Russian and US economies I would not, on the face of it, say that Russia’s performance was good or decent. Oh I agree with the assessment, but for other reasons, not the pure numbers (which are worse than most emerging middle-income markets outside Europe).

I dont agree with this, because russia is not outside of europe. Its bordering next to eurozone countries. Yet it had higher growth with 3.5% than turkey (3%) despite being also richer than turkey per capita. Brazil had 1% growth, you would think they would be the least effetec by eurozone and therefore having the most growth. India has 4.5%, its more but its much poorer than russia having only 1% distant is not so great for them as they have the lower living standard.

And the 4 asian tigers (singapure, hongkong, southkorea, taiwan) had a growth of 1.8%. And they are not so much richer than russia like the US.

GDP per capita 4Tigers 24 thousand $ Russia 13 thousand $

Russia did a good job in 2012 if you think about it thats its dependent on Europe so much.

Both a rather sombre Bloomberg story on Russia’s GDP growth (http://goo.gl/6bngy) and World Bank Russia Overview (http://goo.gl/vShly), tone their their analysis as Russia facing economic “headwinds”. However, after a bit of gloom, Bloomberg’s concluding paragraph seems more upbeat on Russia’s prospects, at least according to the Renaissance Capital guy.

One might suppose that since Kudrin is now in the political arena, his rather gloomy predictions might be somewhat suspect: http://en.rian.ru/business/20130306/179843814.html

Western media is filled up with a clearly anti-Russian stances which often turned into a plain hysterical hateful lies (e.g Kim Zigfeld aka @larusophobe) In its turn there are a herd of anti-american “economists” that predict apocalyptic death of US and EU and prosperity for Russia (e.g. Michael Hazin)

The question is – who is really benefiting from these crazy lies and disinformation on both sides ?

I can somewhat understand Russian anti-American politicians in their propaganda – Russia is going through painful political and economical recovery after 1990s collapse of the USSR. Russia needs some nationalism to help to go through tough times. Something like anti-nazi propaganda in 1940-1945.

What I cannot understand why is that strong , wealthy and prosperous US and EU need anti-Russian propaganda so badly that they reserved to lies and hateful rhetoric on all levels from yellow tabloids to High level officials in State Departments and diplomatic Corpes. Is strong and powerful America with its strong NATO allies are so scared of weak and collapsing Russia ? Or maybe,after all, US/NATO are not so strong economically and military as they want world to believe to ?

From this perspective Mark Adomanis’ articles are a small spring of clear reason in the sea of anti-Russian rants and hysteria sponsored by US State Department and US/UK secret services.

Let me ask you this: If I increased my salary last year by 35% does that mean Russia must be ashamed because I am kicking its ass, even though Russia earns as much in a second as I do in ten years? That is exactly the same kind of absolute gibberish you are spouting when you compare rates of growth between the USA and Russia. With a tiny growth rate, the US produces FAR more wealth for each citizen, and that’s not even to mention Russian corruption, which diverts vast sums from ordinary people.

The notion that someone might prefer living in Russia to the USA because of Russia’s bright prospects is laughable and smacks of neo-Soviet propaganda.

It’s equally laughable to rely on the fictional gibberish of “purchasing power parity.” Do you really believe seeing a Russian doctor is the same as seeing an American one? That goods and services are generally of comparable quality as produced in the two states? Really? How many such products have YOU purchased in the past ten years? Zero point zero.

It’s not a very strange argument to me. I moved to Russia from the US in the 1990s to the laughter of many of my compatriots. Yet, since then, I managed to retire at age 33 while many of them wallow in their underwater mortgages and unemployment. Who’s laughing now?

Thanks Mark, for actually researching and producing some charts, facts, figures and statistics, instead of just being lazy and spouting off a foundationaless Cold-War opinion, like most US and British journalists do.

Well, I saw a dentist in Russia for some bridge work. That was 10 years ago, and it’s still working fine. Cost me $400 there, would have been $6000 in the US. The Russian office was clean and sterile, the people nice.

Russia now has 2 parallel health-care systems, one completely private, and the old public one. The private care system does not have attendant armies of medicrats, secretaries, bureaucrats and anal government oversight. So there is competition, and the prices are much, much lower, since there is competition and they don’t have the Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, administrative overhead.

Just last week I was in for x-rays in two parts of my body. The medical specialist took one set and told me to come back next week for the other set, instead of spending 3 more minutes finishing everything. Why? He gets more money for a separate set. Does this help me? No, I have to spend gas to go to his office, my insurance gets charged twice as much, but he gets more more money in his wallet. The whole US system is corrupt, and Obamacare – that is to step off the cliff.

I could go on about how the monopolistic eyeglasses system in the US is set up to the detriment of the public, and how they abet everyone’s eyes deteriorating so they must regularly purchase new exams and stronger eyeglasses, but that’s a long topic.

I was going to write about doing business in Russia, but I have some work to do here, now, and I already lost what I wrote once to hitting the wonrg keyboard button, so I’ll just post this.

larussophobe, don’t let your opinions about Russia be guided by the media. The Cold War is over. As a conservative, I can’t understand why talk-show people despise Russians, when China is stealing our technology and Middle Eastern countries are morphing into Islamic dictatorships. Why are we supporting Al-Qaeda terrorists in Syria? Liberals are even worse, they think they enjoy moral superiority. not only over other countries, over their own fellow countrymen.

Adomanis has distorted the GDP post recession data for Russia, it has never fallen to 90% of the prior year, the decrease was 7%. See the Rosstat data, gks.ru adjusted to inflation. Adomanis takes his data from Russophobic sources of which he keeps quiet.

Well that is interesting. So prices on everything that is not imported from outside of Russia according to you are rising, but the prices of imports stay the same. Why do you think that is? And have you considered buying imported goods only, I mean why would you want to buy things that constantly increase in price without increasing in value? And for that matter why doesn’t every Russian switch to buying imported products, that way there will be no inflation at all (at least according to your observations). And since imported products must also be taken into account when calculating the inflation rate, why is there an inflation at all. Could it be that, for all this “horrific” inflation, Russian products are still significantly cheaper then the imports and that Russians are glad to buy them and not their European counterparts?

I always enjoy graphs and numbers, but I believe Russia has flaws not taken into consideration. Lack of economic diversity, over-dependence on the EU market, massive corruption, lack of government transparency and cronyism that is off the chats. Sorry but this is not a BRIC worthy of investment IMHO.